Computer question

Rhino Windows Hardware
1

I’m going to buy a new computer soon. I’ve been assuming that I will be paying for as many cores as I can afford because I do a lot of rendering. But I also need to address an issue of Rhino slowing down primarily when I’m working on a model that has components imported from SketchUp which happens often because my clients often send me SketchUp models that I have to convert. What component would improve performance for those situations?

I currently have a i7-6700 with a GTX 970 with 16G of ram.

I’m looking at two different setups -
Threadripper 1950 with a GTX 1080 and 32G of ram
i7-7820 with a GTX 1080Ti and 32G of ram

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

2

Moved to Hardware sub-category.

3

Thanks. Didn’t know there was a hardware category.

4

If you use render engines that can utilize the GPU it may be useful to look for a multi-GPU setup.

5

That raises some questions
I have a license for V-Ray but I primarily use Thea which does utilize the GPU
I wonder how an 16 core cpu with one GTX 1080 compares to an 8 core cpu with two GTX 1080s?

6

If your main target is (GPU) rendering and your main engine supports it I’d go for multi-GPU.

7

Interesting. Got the same reply in the Thea forum. Have to rethink this now.
Worth commenting - when I go to the dropdown list for the forum subcategories Hardware isn’t there. Why is that?

8

However for GPU rendering using Vray, you might want to start simply by buying one or two 1080Ti cards and extra 16 GB RAM, and afterwards you can decide if you still need to replace everything else…

People even recommend keeping the old card to feed the screen while rendering so your computer doesn’t freeze up.

I remember an Octane render senior user who owns 6x 1080Ti and totally obsolete i5-3570K.

Jonas

9

Thanks for the reply. An interesting idea, worth considering.
Not sure if my current motherboard can support two gpus, have to check.

10

Add extra 16 GB to your computer. Rhino and Sketchup are both single threaded applications, so you won’t benefit from extra cores/threads for modelling purposes. And keep your GTX 970 for modelling.

For rendering with Thea it’s also possible to use network rendering, a Thea-license comes with extra nodes. It should be relatively easy to setup: link. Then add a rendering pc to your network (i5 with 2 GTX 1080 or something). Anthony on the Thea forum knows a lot on this stuff. You offload rendering to another pc, so you will be able to model while rendering.

And I don’t know if you wil benefit much of a i7-7820 over an i7-8700K for Rhino and Thea. The X299 platform is much more expensive compared to X370.

For Vray it will be different, it relies much more on CPU (?), but network rendering is also an option. In that case a rendering rig with a Threadripper sounds appealing.